


Tomorrow

by applegnat



Category: Kaminey (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-11
Updated: 2009-11-11
Packaged: 2017-10-04 11:38:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applegnat/pseuds/applegnat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don't think of Charlie Sharma.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tomorrow

They'd called in a lot of favours over the last couple of years, trying to set things up, and it was finally almost done. They were going to branch out in the betting racket; to cricket, with its unthinkably massive television revenues and huge, slavering public. Shumon thought it was a good idea because it was a bottomless pit, this public hunger to play the game, to play games with the game and stake a hundred, five hundred, ten million rupees at a shot on the result. All willing to feel like their fate had had a part to play in the outcome of a match.

The races would always be there to come back to, a faithful and modestly lucrative exploitation of public greed, Shumon thought, a romantic symbol of their origins. The races would be there, Mujeeb thought, because people like Mikhail's young Charlie existed, famished and yearning after the money, the women in their beautiful clothes, a glamour so old-world that not even the farthest reach of their living memories could comprehend it. But the cricket was for Mikhail: a window to the future, much like he himself was. Bringing tomorrow in, like he always had done.

For Mikhail they had done their best, both Shumon and Mujeeb. Before he was born they had been solitary and selfish. They had been happy in the merest little things, the unimportant victories that they accumulated for themselves in the push and pull of the city. They might have done more, been other things, been different men, but Mikhail made them cautious. Mikhail made them stop to breathe, and think about the life they were building for him, the _world_ they were building around him, two tumultous decades ago, with the mills collapsing around them and the old order giving way to something new - more and also less hopeful, more and also less terrifying. He was always there to plan for, and so they planned for him.

They had grown up in historic times themselves; some of the boys who had come up with them in the days of smuggling and dock thefts were now men hunkered down in Karachi, in Portugal, in Malaysia and Kenya, far, far greater than Mujeeb or Shumon had grown, but far less secure, and far more bloody of hand and guilty of conscience. They sent Mikhail to school during the years that these men, these old friends of theirs, exploded bombs along the spine of the city, crushed the last voices of resistance from the trade unions that had once flourished in its industries, and began, in their madness, to shoot each other in the streets while ordinary people and the police waited, and watched. The Bhopes of the world rose, and went into jail, and came out again, and Mikhail grew up untouched, by their past and his present.

He loved the races because they belonged to his brothers. He loved the world because it was safe for him, even with his name and his slight young body, and a family history that had taken years - generations – of weary trudging across the country, and knives and gold biscuits to dig their way out of the kholis of Wadi Bunder, where you could exist all your life knowing nothing but Bengali. He speaks English like an American, reedy little Mikhail, and Marathi like a bus conductor, and Hindi like a heartland brahmin. Like the quiet, enraged boy he found out on the railway tracks one day, and adopted like a pet dog. Like a brother, they noted, but closer, now, in the way the ties of blood could never compel young people, to work and work at the rhythm of a relationship until you found its grooves and slipped in. To share the serendipities of age and, yes, language; to be accomplices in breaking the odd rule that doting elder brothers sometimes made for your own good; to stand hip to hip with, deep in contemplation of a project that absolutely had to be pulled off just right if the earth were to continue revolving around the sun, to run between the wickets with and push food in the direction of; someone to fall asleep with without embarassment, the way you used to when you were a child, and had no compunction about running into one elder brother's room or the other's. They worried over that, Mujeeb and Shumon, because they had not always been there. But they held him in their thoughts, with every breath they took. He held their hearts in his hand, carelessly, like one of his fiendishly complicated and compulsively spleet-new mobile phones.

And this is why they worry when he doesn't call back, early in the morning though it is. They have a business to run, a world to grow, and Mikhail to whom they are handing it. They don't even think of Charlie Sharma, but there are people who do. There are people who know that he lives in the remains of a train carriage in the E.M.U rail yard, not so far from where Shumon was born and Mujeeb grew up. And when the phone call comes, it is not from Mikhail.

They know Bhope's men; they know the names and the faces of each and every person in this city with whom they have avoided doing business for the last two decades. They still don't think of Charlie Sharma, who is a child, a child like Mikhail, and has no idea of what life is really like, and what it can make of your dear, minuscule little dreams, and how love can destroy you with a single huff of breath. They don't realise that they are thinking of Charlie Sharma when they think about who is going to pay for this, because pay someone must, for every last atom of Mikhail. They don't think about today and tomorrow and Mikhail aged eleven, telling his friends in all seriousness that his brothers had fixed the match in Sharjah so that Sachin Tendulkar would score a hundred and thirty-four runs, just because Mikhail had asked them to do it. They don't think of anyone at all, as their arms close around him, cold and washed clean in the night's rain.

But Mujeeb sees Charlie Sharma's face, at least, and hears his voice over the roaring of the fire, breaking in its fury over Mikhail's dead body – Mikhail, _dead._ At least, he thinks before thought is no longer possible, we know that he didn't do it.

**Author's Note:**

> _kholi_ \- (Marathi) room. A euphemism employed to describe the most basic unit of housing in slums (or informal housing, which I think is more accurate as an umbrella term) in Mumbai.
> 
> "old friends" - Slight background if you're interested. The 'dons' who loomed large over the city in the '90s were a vast, sprawling network of friends and enemies, and several of them assumed the status of urban legends. There was Dawood Ibrahim, who is one of the world's most wanted men, accused of operationalising the Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai in 1993, and his friend-turned-enemy Chotta Rajan, and several of their lieutenants who operated significant businesses on their own. All of them fled after the riots, to safe havens abroad. Many of these men got their start in the criminal underworld of an older Bombay and an older India of socialist deprivation and closed markets, working for the old dons on smuggled goods, gold and other precious metals, and gambling and drugs. Although consensus has it that their power has been decimated, and that a new order has taken over in this decade, many of them continue to operate in the city and, indeed, all over the world, from their international hideouts, if they haven't been ruined, betrayed, or caught by the cops. The scale of their activities - the known scale - makes a little match-fixing look like a walk in the park picking daisies.


End file.
